The Sounds of Rain

                                                                 in memoriam Richard Ellmann Richard David Ellmann: prominent American literary critic;  biographer of the Irish writers James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats. Ellman died in Oxford in 1987. Each panel of the triptych is framed within the sound of rain. Its centre-piece II showcases a fellow Nobel laureate and an academic from Harvard days … the poet reflects on comments they made. The side panels are rain-soaked: in I, as the poet emerges from sleep (then came to), Heaney is visited by mourning voices; in III, […]